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Saturday, 25 October 2014

Finn's weave training is progressing well. My previous post describes the work I did using the Two by Two training method. Finn quickly learned to weave a set of four poles this way.

I continued with this approach,also sending him from awkward angles.

Some days however, he would repeatedly try out other behaviours - such as just running alongside the four poles with his nose down - to see if I would reward that. Anyway, I consistently brought him back to where he was comfortable and repeated what he could achieve, before once again challenging him.

Soon I was able to add two more poles and have him do six poles.

Once he was comfortable with that, I set up TWO sets of six about 5 metres apart. After doing each of these singly, I then sent him through both sets one after the other.

In only a few sessions I was then able to bring the two sets of six together and suddenly he was doing twelve weave poles in sequence!!!

WOW... I have to admit I'm a convert to this method of teaching weaves. He really got the idea very quickly.

However he seemed to be taking the poles very slowly and not learning that rhythm that fast dogs develop through the poles. So I re-introduced channels. (The fact that our club now train here and they'd left the channel weaves set up in the field was also irresistible!)

This time channels were much more successful. Instead of just bashing through he was now weaving, and also gathering some speed. On top of that he is getting (mostly) good remote entries.

I took this video the other day - the weaves are open in a channel. I sat on my scooter facing the middle of the set of channel weaves, and sent him through them first one way the the other. He misses one entry, but got it the next time for his reward.